Thomas Fox is a lawyer and independent consultant, assisting companies with anti-corruption and anti-bribery compliance and international transaction issues. He is the author of the award winning FCPA Compliance and Ethics Blog and the international best-selling book “Lessons Learned on Compliance and Ethics”. He is also the author of the seminal text on the ‘nuts and bolts’ of anti-corruption compliance, Doing Compliance, which was published in October 2015 by Compliance Week. Tom writes and comments frequently on issues related to compliance and ethics. Further details can be found at fcpacompliancereport.com

Published: May 30, 2018

The Future of AI and Compliance, with Tom Fox and Tim Estes

In this broadcast, Tom Fox talks with Tim Estes, the President and Founder of Digital Reasoning, an company that provides the world’s leading AI-enabled communication analytics technology that is used by leading financial institutions around the globe.

Tom asked about the work Digital Reasoning (DR) has done to develop AI driven tools that give companies greater insight into the workings of their companies by making unstructured communications data readable for risk management, compliance, and fraud prevention purposes.

Key Points

Innovation can come from any direction. Tom asks Tim about his post-secondary background in philosophy and how his interests in language and meaning factored into the early years of Digital Reasoning. He also provides a brief overview of their trailblazing work in AI machine learning and unstructured data analysis, and describes how DR got into the business of providing communication intelligence solutions for financial institutions.

What is unstructured data and how can it be parsed with the help of AI solutions? Tim talks about why AI is so powerful when it comes to breaking down and organizing unstructured data, such as video, audio, emails, chat, and text documents. He also talks about DR’s approach that is language-focused which looks at background, context, and usage over time.

Making sense of datasets is a fool’s errand without a goal or problem in mind. Tim connects the possibilities of approaching unstructured data from a language perspective with risk management, compliance, and fraud prevention.

One important capability of DR’s financial surveillance tools is centered on understanding the intent of actors within a company. Tim talks about how intent can be tracked through the analysis of unstructured communications data like emails or chat logs and what this knowledge can mean for prevention efforts across departments.

Instead of siloed outside of regular day-to-day operations, Tom sees the future of compliance as a fully-fledged and integrated business process. Tom asks Tim how companies can integrate A.I. tools to operate more efficiently and profitably. Tim talks about three areas of note: automation and scalability, objectivity, and the potential for company-wide vision.

Tim also talks about how the wide-spread deployment of A.I.-driven internal surveillance tools will change the future of industry far beyond the areas of risk management, compliance, and fraud prevention.

Thomas Fox is a lawyer and independent consultant, assisting companies with anti-corruption and anti-bribery compliance and international transaction issues. He is the author of the award winning FCPA Compliance and Ethics Blog and the international best-selling book “Lessons Learned on Compliance and Ethics”. He is also the author of the seminal text on the ‘nuts and bolts’ of anti-corruption compliance, Doing Compliance, which was published in October 2015 by Compliance Week. Tom writes and comments frequently on issues related to compliance and ethics. Further details can be found at fcpacompliancereport.com